Below the Belt
by hallow777
Summary: Possible Spoiler Warning! "This is your fault! All your fault! If he hadn't- If he hadn't been following you around none of this would have happened!"


**POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR KNOCKOUT! DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE SPOILED!**

**Also this isn't exactly my normal type of fanfic, so those looking for my normal humor filled fanfics need to run far, far away from here.**

**"Below the Belt" is yet another boxing reference. I love the whole boxing thing they have going here. Makes it easy to find titles.**

**I do NOT own Castle.**

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><p>"The good news is, is that we were able to patch him up nicely. The bullet managed to miss the vital organs so there shouldn't be any lasting damage." The Emergency Room surgeon looked at the faces of the group of people who were sitting in the waiting room, hanging onto his every word. They looked like they had all been through hell, which made telling them what he had to so much harder.<p>

"The bad news is, is that while the bullet missed Mr. Castle's vital organs, it did nick some arteries, causing him to lose a significant amount of blood and go into shock. He is currently in a coma." Gasps filled the room so the doctor hurried to give them some hope. "We've been monitoring his brainwaves, and they are normal so there is no doubt that he _will_ wake up. It's just a matter of when."

No one knew what to do or say after hearing that and after a few minutes of silence, the doctor walked away to get back to his job.

"_If something were to happen to me, I want you to watch out for Alexis." _What Castle had said to her during the Medina case came back to her, and Beckett turned to look at Alexis who was just staring at the double doors that they had rushed Castle through earlier.

There wasn't anything else that she could do right now, so she decided that maybe she could at least try to comfort the obviously distraught younger girl.

Beckett stood up from her chair and walked up behind the young girl, ignoring the fact that everyone else was staring at her, and laid her hand gently on her shoulder.

The reaction she got when Alexis realized who it was was not what she was expecting from the normally polite and calm red-haired teen.

"Don't you touch me!" The girl violently twisted away from the detective and screamed so loud that she halfway expected Castle to wake up from his coma and come running out to see what was wrong, making all the people in the waiting room jump. "This is your fault! All your fault! If he hadn't- If he hadn't been following you around none of this would have happened!"

Martha jumped up out of the chair she had been sitting in and rushed over to Alexis, pulling the teen out of the room and into the hallway before coming back inside the waiting room to grab her and Alexis' purses.

"She didn't mean what she said, dear. She's just extremely upset right now. It's not your fault, okay? Now I'm going to talk to the nurse to see if there is anything else we need to do, and then I'll take her home."

The older woman waited until Beckett nodded that she understood, and then she hurried back to Alexis' side.

"She's right, you know? Mrs. R, I mean. Absolutely none of this was your fault, and you couldn't have prevented it either, so don't you dare start thinking like that. The Captain...The Captain did what he had to do, no one could have stopped him. The same with Castle. No one could have stopped him from doing what he did. They made their own choices." Esposito gave a small smile, trying to cheer Beckett up but it wasn't really working so Ryan jumped in.

"Just you wait, I give it a week before he's awake and following you around like a lost puppy again."

"I know." She muttered, that's what she was afraid of.

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><p>The next day, Ryan and Esposito came into work early, knowing that with the Captain gone, they needed to get the paperwork done as soon as possible so that things wouldn't get hectic when the new captain took over.<p>

They had expected Beckett to be in early too, but when she wasn't there soon after they got there, they didn't worry.

When the clock signaled it was the time that she normally came in at, and she didn't show, they just assumed she was sleeping in. After all, she did go through hell yesterday. They all did.

But when an hour had past and she still wasn't there, they began to worry, but told themselves that maybe she had decided to take the day off.

It wasn't until Esposito got up to get some coffee and happened to glance into the Captain's office that they found out why she never came in.

"Ryan! Get over here!" He called and Ryan immediately got up and came over to where Esposito was pointing through the window at something laying on the desk.

"No way... She wouldn't, right?" The two looked at each other for a minute before simultaneously reaching for the door and pushing it open.

Lying on the desk was a badge, a holstered gun, and a resignation letter signed by one Katherine Beckett.

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><p><strong>Along with resigning, Beckett also disappears (at least for a while) but I couldn't figure out how to put that in the story because I really, really wanted to end it with that line.<strong>

**So yeah... I also had another idea like this but where Martha was the one who died, but that one would have been extremely angsty for poor Alexis so I decided to go with this one instead. Plus it's more likely that it's the Captain. Though it still could be Martha.**

**Molly has been hinting for a while now that Alexis might not be on the Caskett ship, so of course after thinking about Knockout theories all day, this one pretty much came up and slapped me in the face. I don't want it to happen, but I could totally see something like this happening.**

**If you have questions I will answer them but FF . net has been kinda weird about letting me reply to reviews so I will probably have to PM you to answer you.**


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